Clearing the Stream: New & Selected Poems 1975-2025

Clearing the Stream gathers fifty years of Dennis Maloney's poems into a single collection-a sustained record of one poet's attention to the world. He writes with equal care about a calligrapher's brush and the catastrophes of war, about snowfall and legacy, about remaining awake to beauty without turning away from harm. Rather than circling a single autobiographical self, these poems open into something more spacious: a way of being in the world that readers are invited to share.

"Clearing the Stream celebrates a half-century of Dennis Maloney's poetic journey with a collection that longs to hold the world gently: 'We are fragile vessels / anchoring sky to earth.' I so admire how these poems carry a deep compassion for stillness, for life, and for the natural world. His work offers the kind of clarity and grace we need in this present moment-meditations, moments like a shimmering streetlight asking: 'How is your world?' Maloney's poems are at once lyrical and political, intimate and expansive, responding to the question: 'What shall remain / as my legacy? And what is the answer? ' Presence, birdsong, snowfall, a calligrapher's brush, memory, beauty. What a radiant collection, what an offering of a life lived in poetry, what an absolutely stunning book of poems for us to hold."

-Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Accidental Devotions

"With Clearing the Stream, Dennis Maloney gathers the currents of a half century of his deep and abiding relationship with the page. This gathering bears witness to a life lived mindfully and full of heart and history and profound awareness of the natural world. Truly, these poems are a testament and a delight. "

-Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky and When We Were Birds

"Over the decades, Dennis Maloney's poems have always pointed to 'the urgency of life itself'; the new poems collected here include some of the most quietly devastating imaginings of war I've ever read. This book contains a half of a century of meticulous, clear-headed study of the self, not who it is, but what it is, yet the poems are never, ever about the self. They float free of a single identity, which is beautiful and rare."

-Chase Twichell, author of Things As It Is